Better to brush than to crush

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8/3/2004

The next
time a mosquito flies in the window of your cab to use you as an
all-you-can-eat buffet, don’t swat, squash or otherwise crush the irritating
critter. It may be better, scientists say, to flick it off.

Scientists
writing in the New England Journal of
Medicine offered the advice recently after studying the case of a 57-year-old woman who became infected in
November 2002 with a fungus called brachiola algerae.

The woman was taking drugs for rheumatoidarthritis that weakened
her immune system, which made her more susceptible to the infection. However,
normally, that fungus does not infect people, and cannot under normal
circumstances be transferred from mosquitoes to people.

Doctors concluded that the woman contracted the illness when
she crushed a mosquito as it was biting her, forcing the fungus, which was in
the insect’s internal organ, into the bite wound.

"I
think if a mosquito was in mid-bite, it would be wiser to flick the mosquito
off rather than squashing it," an authors of the study, Christina Coyle of
the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, told The Associated Press.